PPP Green Transition is a collaboration between five already well-run public-private partnerships (business, education and government) in the northern Netherlands. These are PPPs in the water, chemical and food sectors.
We seek cooperation because the challenges facing the sectors, water, chemicals and food have overlapping societal challenges in terms of climate change, environmental pollution and energy transition.
Some of the challenges we face include:
To deal with these - and many other challenges - education, business and governments from the Northern Netherlands are joining forces. We are launching initiatives, projects and working groups to, for example, develop education to upskill and/or retrain people in the regional business community.
Business, education and government work together within Green Transition. This involves five well-run PPPs joining forces:
There are several work packages under which we divide our work. Each work package has its own focus points and deliverables.
Within this work package, we aim to strengthen the ecosystem around the food, water and chemistry sectors. We aim to stimulate better cooperation between the professional field and education. We want to involve new partners, such as SMEs, to make the ecosystem grow.
By innovating together and expanding networks, we will make education more attractive and better prepare students for practice. We will investigate how to improve this cooperation and make plans to get more students enthusiastic about our programmes. One example is a ‘customer journey’ in which we follow students' experiences from day one, so that we can guide them even better. We also deploy relationship managers to organise events and strengthen cooperation with companies. This is how we make this ecosystem a place where everyone feels at home and grows.
To connect and scale up Learning Communities, we design and develop hybrid learning environments that support the linking of Learning-Work-Innovation and strengthen our PPP ecosystem around education, research and clusters. The lessons learned from the PPS WVLO (Flexible Workforce in Learning Organisations) concerning the development of cohesion in flexible workmanship and learning organisations and the lessons learned from the CIV Water with hybrid learning systems are the starting point. This creates networking opportunities for the professional field and education to develop and exchange knowledge. In addition, we develop solutions in the field of retention and development of fellow workers to support the green transition. In these hybrid learning environments, we define issues with a cross-sectoral character from connection & chain development companies, teachers, researchers.
As part of our Learning Community approach of experimenting in a hybrid learning environment, this work package carries out several tasks that support talent development and innovation of professional practice. We facilitate learning-working-innovation in the water, food and chemical sectors involved in this PPP ecosystem and crossover issues that support the regional agenda around the green transition.
In the water sector, we will explore and define three water chain issues together with end-users and partners. Here, we are looking at connecting innovation and professional practice education. We are also designing pilots to address chain issues with hybrid teachers, practical supervisors and various courses. CiV water also invests in refining the hybrid learning environment and in the Water Application Centre for lifelong development, demonstration and innovation; a.o. irt demosite Wetterskip Fryslân.
The food and chemical sectors are also represented within the project. For instance, Bakery Sweets Centre (BSC) has initiated an interesting trajectory in 2022: making the bread chain circular. Within a piilot, they collected returnable bread and used the bread paste to make delicious new products such as sugar bread and biscuits. BSC wants to continue with this concept and sees opportunities to facilitate training and educational forms based on this concept at a new location.
Within chemistry, crossovers are being sought with other sectors. For instance, on issues of environmental pollution by (micro)plastics in water.
We want to set up hybrid learning environments in which the professional field, research and education work together to support talent development and in-service training of professionals in the professional field. The development and adaptation of context-rich infrastructure in the food, chemical and water sectors is necessary to support this process.
In process engineering, it is important that people can learn by experimenting. However, experimentation in a fullscale plant is not possible because the consequences of a mistake are unacceptable. Think food safety, product quality, malfunctions and damage to the production line. Therefore, it is important to have an environment where people can experiment and learn under fullscale conditions but without consequences.
Within this work package, we develop measures to ensure the governance and steering of this PPP scale-up. We will set up a programme team and organise meetings and quarterly consultations.
To properly monitor and evaluate our activities in this PPP scale-up, and ensure long-term continuity, we will carry out the following tasks:
At the moment, the biggest gain is that the various PPPs know how to find each other and that solutions to the (societal) issues we are facing at the moment and in the future are now being sought together. This seemingly small development is of great importance because together we are better able to provide solutions for the major challenges.
Some of the great results and successful activities so far:
Green Transition in Water, Chemistry & Food is a collaboration between five already well-run public-private partnerships (business, education and government) in the Northern Netherlands. Do the challenges we face in terms of climate change, environmental pollution and energy transition sound familiar to you? And would you like to exchange views, or just spar about the possibilities of what we can do for each other?
